'Wow! Some loving affectionate letter!' Jock exclaimed softly. 'Just exactly what did little Tiffany do with Cliff Farrow to deserve it? I mean, I can guess, but give me the juicy details.'
'Sorry. We don't have the details, Jock.' Borman smiled. 'Whatever happened, little Tiffany ran away to the big city. As she had acted in a couple of high school productions and had always dreamed of becoming a Hollywood star, she answered an ad in the paper for girls with acting experience. Result so far — three films like the one you saw at my house last week. My client — his name is Dippy Gallagher, by the way, and it fits him perfectly — says she is one of his most cooperative stars. Apparently he is obliged to use booze, drugs, blackmail and sometimes even force on some of the other actresses to get them to play their roles realistically.
'Sordid bastard,' Jock interposed with a chuckle.
'He is,' Borman agreed. 'But, apparently, Tiffany doesn't need any artificial stimulants. She's sure she's on the road to Hollywood and is happy as a lark, except for one little item. Cliff Farrow is bugging her to death. He found out what she is doing, and it's tearing him apart. He follows her everywhere like a dog, begging her to marry him and come back home. He is out of a job, running out of money and drinking himself to death. A very sad state of affairs.'
'I think I get it,' Jock said with a gleam in his eye. 'You're going to bring the three of them together, June, Tiffany and Cliff, and see what happens, right? But suppose nothing happens?'
'That's where you and I come in.' Borman winked broadly at his friend. 'That's why I asked you if you could run fast enough to snatch a lady's pocketbook and get away with it. We've got to make damned sure something does happen.' Then he quickly outlined to the younger man the plan that had been gradually taking shape in his mind ever since he had recognized Tiffany in the movie the week before. When he had finished, Jock whistled again, this time in admiration.
'By God, Axel,' he drawled. 'It's a good thing you can't manipulate stocks the way you can people.'
'What makes you think I can't?' Borman grunted derisively. 'Anyway, Jock, do you think Stella will mind you… uh… taking a part in this little drama? It goes without saying the film will never leave our hands, of course.'
'Are you kidding!' Jock exclaimed. 'It'll turn Stella on. Now, let's go over it again. There are a few bugs to work out. First, you get in touch with Gallagher to start the ball rolling, right. And then…'
So the two men ordered another drink and settled back to plan the scenario of the events which were to take place about a week later.
CHAPTER THREE
The following Monday, after a lengthy conversation with Borman, Dippy Gallagher sent for Tiffany. He was on the phone when she went into his office, a tiny leprechaun of a man, completely bald, intensely nervous, perpetually scowling, almost hidden by a huge desk cluttered with stacks of glossy photos portraying both male and female nudes in various provocative poses and obscene acts, most of them covered with a fine film of dust and cigar ashes.
'What!' he was screaming into the phone in a high-pitched anguished voice. 'She shaved what…! Her pussy! So she gets a merkin — a pussy wig! Whaddaya mean they don't make pussy wigs? Shit yes, they do, oh hell! Then get another broad. Throw the dumb cunt out on the street.'
He slammed down the receiver and stared ferociously at Tiffany. 'In the year of our Lord nineteen seventy- three,' he intoned dramatically, 'the decade of Hair! She goes and shaves her pussy. Who does she think she is, Dolly Dimple? I swear to God if my mother wasn't Jewish I wouldn't be alive today. Show biz! Do me a favor. Go tell it to the East River. Siddown, kid.'
He popped a pill into his shark-like mouth, washed it down with a swig from a bottle of vodka he kept stashed in his desk, and leaned back with his hands clasped behind his head to survey Tiffany with his beady little eyes.
Tiffany avoided his gaze. The office with its shabby dingy walls, plastered with more obscene photographs, and its odor of stale cigar smoke and… she sometimes imagined… stale cum… depressed her beyond words.
To begin with it hadn't been so bad. In fact, the first time she went there in answer to the ad for girls with acting experience the atmosphere of corruption and decadence, even evil, which pervaded the office and the enormous loft upstairs where most of the films were shot had perversely excited her. She had had it up to here with the neat orderly life at home in Maryland, her constantly complaining father and her sister June's prudish domineering ways, so she plunged enthusiastically into her new life as an actress in blue movies. She was getting paid pretty good money for doing what she had loved to do since she was fourteen — fucking and sucking… and as a whole the actors she performed with were handsome virile studs with big potent cocks, even though a lot of them were strung out on drugs, mostly amphetamines, because needle marks were hard to hide even with the best of make-up creams. Then there was always the hope of Hollywood shimmering in the future, the hope cleverly planted and nourished by Dippy Gallagher that any day a talent scout would see one of their films and sign her up for the Big Time.
But Tiffany was getting discouraged. Already three movies in two months and not the slightest nibble. The glamour in the business, what little she had ever thought there was, had faded and that afternoon she was feeling particularly down. She had just finished a scene where she was anally raped by a satyr, complete with plastic horns and hooves, against a backdrop of an idyllic glen deep in the ferny woods of ancient Greece, painted by a bombed- out character from Houston, Texas, by way of the East Village. Anyway, the horsehair or whatever they made the satyr's costume out of had rubbed her tender ass-cheeks and inner thighs raw and she couldn't wait to get home and hop into a hot bath.
Gallagher saw the sulky pouting expression on Tiffany's rather wan heart-shaped face and decided he knew exactly what she needed… A little jolt in the tookus.
'Let's see your tits, kid,' he snarled. 'C'mere.'
'God, haven't you seen them enough,' Tiffany protested sullenly, getting up nevertheless and going around the desk toward him. She knew she had to… anyway Dippy had never been known to screw around with any of the members of his 'troupe'. One rumor had it that he was completely impotent, another that he had a two-hundred pound wife ensconced in a mansion on a big estate on Long Island somewhere. Nobody knew anything for sure about Dippy except that after work he disappeared into the canyons of New York like a rabbit up a magician's sleeve… and was never known to screw around with his actresses. Tiffany obediently unbuttoned her dress and pulled it down so that her girlish but shapely breasts swung free, rising in comely succulent arcs from her smooth- skinned torso.
'Ice 'em!' Dippy snapped.
'Wh-at? Wha'd you say?' Tiffany stammered, taken completely off guard. She stared down at her breasts as if she had never seen them before.
'Put ice on 'em,' Dippy spat at her. 'They're sagging already. Get some ice packs. Freeze 'em the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. You wanna stay away from silicone, right, kid? Nobody knows the long run effects. But the show's gotta go on, and the tits gotta be firm. So… ice packs! And another thing!' he yammered before Tiffany could get her wits together. 'Humpty-Dumpty's gotta go!'
Tiffany's heart sank. Humpty-Dumpty was Gallagher's derisive nickname for Cliff Farrow. 'He-he didn't come back here, did he?' she faltered. 'He promised me he never would again.'
'Humpty-Dumpty,' Dippy recited, 'took a great fall. He's downstairs right now, puking in the hall.'
'Oh Goddd,' Tiffany groaned. Ever since Cliff had found out what she was really doing he had been impossible. Impossible! Following her around all the time, making terrible drunken scenes in public places. 'Listen, Mr. Gallagher,' she put as much persuasion as she could into her voice. 'He'll never come back again, I swear he won't. I'll tell him I'll never see him again.'
'Nix, baby, you already tried that,' Dippy reminded her irritably. 'And it didn't work. We don't want sloppy drunks hanging around our Stage Door Entrance. It gives the studio a bad name. Uh-uh! The next time he shows, you're out! And that would be a shame. Because you got talent, kid. You got what it takes. You still wanna go west, don'cha?'
